Joan Didion On Stage

On Monday night, the bubbly essayist Sloane Crosley interviewed Joan Didion at the New York Public Library in one of several events across the city marking the release of Didion’s book “Blue Nights.” The two had submitted seven-word introductions for the evening, and these, as you might expect, were a study in contrasts. Crosley: “Bit into dessert looking for a meal.” Didion: “Seven words do not yet define me.”

Interviewer and subject sat in imposing gold-brocade Queen Anne-style chairs. Didion’s head barely cleared the back of hers. On the table next to her was the requisite glass of water and a small vase of tightly-packed, closed orange tulips—the sort of fine touch one finds in her writing. It took Didion a couple of questions to warm up, and even then she gazed into the distance when responding to questions, as if she needed to pinpoint a spot in the back of the room on which to focus.

“The first thing I thought of for tonight was how funny you are, and I don’t think people always notice it,” Crosley began, noting a passage in “Blue Nights” where Didion is asked to swallow a camera during a medical procedure. Didion read:

I recall resisting: since I had never in my life been able to swallow an aspirin it seemed unlikely that I could swallow a camera.

“Of course you can, it’s only a little camera.”

A pause. The attempt at briskness declined into wheedling: “It’s really a very little camera.”

In the end I did swallow the very little camera, and the very little camera transmitted the desired images, which did not demonstrate what was causing the bleed but did demonstrate that with sufficient sedation anyone could swallow a very little camera.

While humor comes pretty easily to her, Didion said, the nature of her subject matter means that “people don’t notice it because it makes them uncomfortable.”

Crosley asked Didion why people didn’t think of her more often as a fiction writer.

“Because the fiction I have written has not sold as much as the non-fiction I have written,” said Didion.

“That’s a solid reason,” Crosley said.

“Blue Nights” falls squarely in the non-fiction category for Didion; she doesn’t think of it as a memoir. “I don’t know what I thought it was. It was an extended essay. But memoir seemed a little soft to me.” She also stressed that though the book may look like “The Year of Magical Thinking,” it’s not the same. “Blue Nights” required a different rhythm—one more like jazz, she said.

Didion talked about technique. “You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line,” she said, or one observation of a model walking across the room in Vegas. But the work you’re doing, she explained, “is somehow separate from your life. It’s different. So you can hold two ideas. A) This is an impossible subject for me to write about. B) I am writing about it, and it’s going pretty well. You can hold those ideas without breaking up.”

Her habit was to write during the day, and then in the evening to mark up the pages she had finished, before finally making corrections in the morning to start the next day’s work.

“Are you harder on yourself at night?” Crosley asked.

“No, but I can have a drink at night,” Didion said—she feels she needs it to loosen up enough to rework the text. She had begun the editing process on “Blue Nights” drinking bourbon, but “slipped into white-wine mode.”

At one point, Crosley wanted to talk about the theatrical version of “Magical Thinking,” recounting a line that struck her when Vanessa Redgrave, who played Didion in the show, delivered it. “Do you remember the first time you heard that?” she asked.

“I wrote it,” Didion replied.

Crosley described being nervous that she would say something derogatory about Barnard, where Didion’s daughter Quintana studied, though she had no particular prejudice about Barnard and couldn’t imagine what would provoke such a remark. Didion found this hilarious. When Crosley asked if people were now too cautious around Didion, she laughed again. “I never think people are too careful with me.”